Mauthausen Concentration Camp

1. Lead

Mauthausen was one of the harshest concentration camps of the Nazi regime. Built in 1938 on a granite hill near the town of Mauthausen in Upper Austria, about twenty kilometres east of Linz, it began as a camp for prisoners the SS classified as political opponents and so-called criminals, and it grew into the centre of a vast network of more than forty subcamps across Austria.

Prisoners were forced to work in the granite quarries, in armaments factories, and in tunnel construction, under a regime of deliberate exhaustion, starvation, beatings, and murder. Between 1938 and liberation in May 1945, an estimated 90,000 to 120,000 people died at Mauthausen and its subcamps, according to the figures used by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Mauthausen Memorial; some estimates of the total, including subcamps, run higher, and the exact number cannot be fixed because the SS destroyed many records.

The victims included political prisoners from across occupied Europe, Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, Spanish Republicans, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual men, and people the Nazis labelled asocial. Mauthausen is remembered above all for the granite quarry and the 186 steps known as the Stairs of Death, where prisoners carried heavy stone blocks up from the quarry floor.

Liberated by American troops on 5 May 1945, the camp is today a memorial and museum. This article presents the history of Mauthausen factually and without sensational detail, in the spirit of remembrance and education, and it records the death toll as a range, as the sources require.

2. Key Facts

Field	Value
Name	Mauthausen Concentration Camp (Konzentrationslager Mauthausen)
Location	Near Mauthausen, Upper Austria, about 20 km east of Linz
Operated	8 August 1938 – 5 May 1945
Founded by	SS, after the annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938
Classification	Grade III camp — the harshest category in the SS system, for prisoners deemed incorrigible
Main camp and subcamps	Main camp at Mauthausen plus more than 40 subcamps, including Gusen, Ebensee, and Melk
Main labour	Granite quarries (Wiener Graben), armaments production, tunnel and factory construction
Known feature	The Stairs of Death — 186 uneven steps from the quarry to the camp
Prisoners	About 190,000 people passed through the Mauthausen system
Death toll	Estimated 90,000 to 120,000 deaths at Mauthausen and its subcamps (USHMM and Mauthausen Memorial figures)
Liberation	5 May 1945, by the 11th Armored Division of the United States Army
Today	Mauthausen Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen), museum and place of remembrance

3. Background

Founding after the Anschluss

Mauthausen was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938. The SS chose the site for a practical reason: the granite quarries around Mauthausen had supplied stone for building projects, and the SS-owned company Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke wanted a captive workforce to exploit them.

The first prisoners arrived on 8 August 1938 from Dachau, and they were forced to build the camp itself — barracks, walls, watchtowers, and the quarry infrastructure — before the camp formally opened. Unlike camps created primarily for the mass murder of Jews, Mauthausen was first a camp of forced labour and punishment, classified by the SS as a Grade III camp, the most severe category, intended for prisoners who were considered especially dangerous or incorrigible.

In practice the distinction between labour and murder collapsed. The regime was designed so that work itself killed: inadequate food, twelve-hour shifts, beatings by guards and prisoner-functionaries, exposure, and disease.

Expansion across Occupied Europe

From 1940 the camp expanded rapidly as Germany occupied more of Europe. Polish intellectuals and political prisoners arrived after the invasion of Poland; French, Dutch, Belgian, and Yugoslav resisters followed; Soviet prisoners of war were sent in large numbers from 1941; and Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the Spanish Civil War formed one of the largest national groups.

Jews were deported to Mauthausen in large numbers from 1944, particularly from Hungary and the Netherlands, and many were transferred onward or died there. The camp’s population therefore changed constantly, and each new transport brought people who knew nothing of the camp’s rules and who died in large numbers in their first days.

New arrivals were often put straight to work in the quarry without any period of adjustment, and the camp’s administration recorded their deaths in registers that the SS later tried to destroy. The camp also served the war economy: from 1943, prisoners built underground factories at Gusen and Ebensee for the production of aircraft and rocket components.

The Camp and the War Economy

The war economy gave Mauthausen a second purpose that kept it growing even as the German armies retreated. The SS leased prisoners to private firms, which paid the SS for their labour and provided almost nothing in return, so that a prisoner’s death was a minor cost to the firm and a profit to the SS.

At Gusen, prisoners built an underground factory for the Messerschmitt aircraft company, working in tunnels where dust, damp, and exhaustion killed men in large numbers. At Ebensee, prisoners dug tunnels for the production of rocket components, and at Melk they built a factory inside a mountain for the production of ball bearings.

The firms that used this labour included some of the largest names in German industry, and their managers visited the camps and saw the conditions. The war economy thus tied the camp to the ordinary world of contracts, invoices, and production targets, and it is one of the reasons historians study Mauthausen as a case of how a modern economy can be organised around forced labour and murder.

4. What Happened

Daily Life, Labour and Terror

Life in Mauthausen followed the pattern of the SS concentration camp system, carried to an extreme. New arrivals were stripped, shaved, registered, and given striped uniforms and wooden clogs. They slept in overcrowded barracks, often three to a bunk, and were fed a thin soup and a small ration of bread that provided far fewer calories than the work demanded. Roll calls lasted for hours in all weather.

Punishment was arbitrary and constant: beatings, hanging by the wrists, standing cells, and the punishment company, where prisoners were given the heaviest work. The food ration, a thin soup and a small piece of bread, provided far fewer calories than a man doing heavy labour needed, so that prisoners lost weight steadily and became weaker each week.

Disease spread quickly in the overcrowded barracks, where typhus and dysentery killed men who had survived the quarry, and the infirmary offered almost no treatment, serving instead as a place where the sick were selected for death.

The Granite Quarry

The granite quarry was the centre of the camp’s terror. Prisoners descended 186 irregular steps to the quarry floor, worked the rock face with hammers and drills, and carried blocks of granite weighing up to fifty kilograms back up the steps. Guards and prisoner-functionaries pushed, beat, and sometimes forced exhausted men off the edge of the quarry.

The work was deliberately pointless as well as lethal: much of the stone was used for building projects that were never finished, and the quarry’s purpose was as much punishment as production. Prisoners assigned to the quarry were known as the punishment company, and their life expectancy was measured in weeks rather than months, which is why the quarry became the symbol of Mauthausen in survivor testimony and in the memorial today.

Visitors to the memorial still walk the 186 steps and see the quarry floor below, and the scale of the place makes the survivor accounts comprehensible in a way that words alone cannot achieve.

The Gas Chamber, Hartheim and the Final Months

The camp also contained a gas chamber, built in 1941, and a crematorium; prisoners who were too sick or weak to work were killed by gas, by lethal injection, or by transfer to the Hartheim killing centre near Linz, where thousands of Mauthausen prisoners were murdered. Medical experiments were carried out on prisoners.

From 1942, Soviet prisoners of war were treated with particular brutality, and thousands died of starvation and exposure. As the war turned against Germany, the camp population swelled with prisoners evacuated from camps further east, including Auschwitz, in death marches in the winter of 1944–45. In the final weeks, the SS attempted to destroy evidence, murdered prisoners, and fled as American troops approached.

When the Americans arrived on 5 May, they found thousands of sick and starving prisoners and the bodies of those who had died in the last days of the war.

5. Key People and Places

Commanders, Prisoners and Organisation

The camp was commanded for most of its existence by Franz Ziereis, an SS officer who ran Mauthausen from 1939 until its liberation and who was shot while fleeing and died shortly afterwards. Under him, the camp staff included guards and prisoner-functionaries — kapos and block leaders, some of them German criminals — who enforced discipline with violence. Among the prisoners, national and political organisation mattered for survival.

The Spanish Republicans, who arrived in large numbers in 1940–41, formed a well-organised community that kept records, smuggled photographs, and helped new arrivals; their photographer, Francisco Boix, preserved images of the camp that later became crucial evidence at Nuremberg. Polish prisoners, including the artist and writer Józef Czapski’s circle and the resistance organisation inside the camp, maintained clandestine networks. Soviet prisoners, despite appalling mortality, organised mutual aid.

The camp’s clandestine organisations also kept records in secret, noting the names of the dead and the crimes of the guards, and those records became evidence after the war.

Individual Stories of Survival

Individual stories stand out: the Austrian priest and resistance figure, the Czech and French intellectuals who kept diaries, and the young people who survived by being assigned to slightly less lethal work in the camp kitchens or workshops. Survival often depended on small advantages of this kind: a job indoors, a friend in the kitchen, a language shared with a prisoner-functionary, or a skill the SS needed, such as photography, carpentry, or clerical work.

Those who had none of these advantages, above all the Soviet prisoners of war and the Jews deported in 1944, died in far larger proportions, and their stories are therefore harder to recover, because so few of them lived to tell them.

The memoirs that do survive from these groups were often written years later, when the authors could finally speak of what they had endured, and they remain the most direct evidence of the daily life of the camp and of the small acts of solidarity that made survival possible.

The Camp and Its Subcamps

The places within the camp tell its story: the Wiener Graben quarry and the Stairs of Death; the Appellplatz, the roll-call square; the gas chamber and crematorium; the infirmary, where the sick were often selected for death; and the subcamps — Gusen, the largest, with its own quarries and underground factories; Ebensee, where prisoners dug tunnels for rocket production; and Melk, where prisoners built a factory inside a mountain.

Each subcamp had its own regime and its own death toll, and together they form the Mauthausen system. Gusen alone held tens of thousands of prisoners and had a death toll comparable to the main camp, while Ebensee and Melk, built late in the war, killed thousands more in a few months of underground construction, showing how the system expanded even as Germany was losing the war.

The subcamps are now marked by memorials of their own, and the Mauthausen Memorial maintains them as part of the history of the whole system.

6. Survivors and Testimony

Boix, Wiesenthal and the First Testimonies

Survivors of Mauthausen bore witness at trials, in memoirs, and in the archives that the Mauthausen Memorial now preserves. The most famous testimony is the photographic evidence smuggled out by Francisco Boix, a Spanish prisoner assigned to the camp’s photographic laboratory, who hid negatives and prints that showed the SS, the quarry, and the bodies of murdered prisoners; these images were presented at the Nuremberg trials and at the trial of the camp staff at Dachau in 1946.

The Spanish survivor and writer Jorge Semprún, deported to Buchenwald rather than Mauthausen, wrote about the camp system as a whole, while Mauthausen survivors such as the Austrian Simon Wiesenthal — who survived Mauthausen and devoted his life after the war to tracking Nazi criminals — became public voices for remembrance.

The Polish survivor and historian Stanisław Grzesiuk and the French survivor Pierre Serge Choumoff, among many others, wrote accounts that historians still use.

The Archive of Testimony

Survivor testimony is also preserved in the Mauthausen Memorial’s audio archive and in the collections of Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These accounts share common themes: the cold and hunger, the arbitrary violence, the importance of solidarity within national or political groups, and the small acts — sharing bread, hiding a sick comrade, remembering a name — that made survival possible.

Historians treat survivor testimony with care, cross-checking it against SS documents, photographs, and post-war trial records, because memory after trauma is fallible and because the SS destroyed many records. The broad picture that emerges from the combined sources is consistent: a camp in which death was not an accident of war but the intended product of the system.

The archives continue to grow as families donate letters and photographs, and each new document adds a name, a face, or a detail to the record that the SS tried to destroy.

7. Trials and Justice

The Dachau Trial of the Camp Staff

After liberation, the United States Army tried the Mauthausen camp staff before a military tribunal at Dachau in 1946. Sixty-one defendants, including the acting commandant and senior SS officers, doctors, and prisoner-functionaries, stood trial for war crimes committed at Mauthausen and its subcamps.

The prosecution relied on SS documents, the photographs preserved by Francisco Boix, and the testimony of survivors who described the quarry, the gas chamber, and the killings at Hartheim. Fifty-eight of the defendants were convicted, and forty-nine were sentenced to death; most of the death sentences were carried out in 1947 and 1948.

Franz Ziereis, the long-serving commandant, never stood trial: he was shot while attempting to flee in May 1945 and died of his wounds shortly afterwards. The Dachau trial was one of the earliest and most important camp trials, and it established a detailed public record of what had happened at Mauthausen. Its limits were also clear.

Many guards and prisoner-functionaries were never identified or tried, some defendants received prison sentences that were later reduced, and the focus on the main camp meant that crimes at the subcamps received less attention than they deserved. Later trials in West Germany and Austria, and the work of Simon Wiesenthal in tracking down former SS men, continued the search for accountability for decades, but most of the perpetrators were never brought to court.

Justice, Memory and the Question of Responsibility

The question of responsibility at Mauthausen extended beyond the SS guards. The camp existed because Austrian and German firms profited from its labour: the granite quarries supplied stone for building projects, and armaments firms used prisoners to build underground factories and produce aircraft and rocket components.

After the war, few of those firms or their managers were prosecuted, and the economic history of the camp became a subject for historians rather than courts. The Austrian state itself long avoided the question: after 1945 Austria presented itself as the first victim of Nazi aggression, a position that discouraged discussion of Austrian participation in the SS, the Gestapo, and the camp system.

That position was challenged from the 1980s onwards, notably during the debate over President Kurt Waldheim’s wartime record, and Austria eventually acknowledged its share of responsibility, paid compensation to victims, and supported the memorial. The Nuremberg trials, where Boix’s photographs were shown, addressed the leaders of the regime as a whole, but the specific crimes of Mauthausen were mainly dealt with at Dachau.

For survivors, the trials mattered less for the sentences than for the public record they created: a record that the camp had existed, that the killings had been systematic, and that the victims had names. That record remains the foundation of the memorial’s work today.

Simon Wiesenthal and the Search for the Perpetrators

Simon Wiesenthal, who survived Mauthausen and was liberated there in May 1945, devoted the rest of his life to finding Nazi war criminals and bringing them to trial. Working from Vienna with a small documentation centre, he gathered evidence, tracked the movements of former SS officers, and passed information to prosecutors in several countries.

His work contributed to the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and others, and it kept the question of justice alive at a time when many governments preferred to forget. Wiesenthal’s approach was controversial — he was criticised by some for his methods and by others for focusing on individual perpetrators rather than the system — but his central argument shaped post-war remembrance: that justice delayed was still justice, and that the victims were owed the effort of remembering their names and pursuing those who had killed them.

Wiesenthal died in 2005, and his archive is now held in Vienna, where it continues to support research into the Holocaust and the camp system.

8. The Site Today

The Memorial and Museum

The site of the main camp at Mauthausen is today the Mauthausen Memorial, a museum and place of remembrance maintained by the Republic of Austria. The barracks, the Appellplatz, the quarry, the Stairs of Death, the gas chamber, and the crematorium are preserved, and the museum presents the history of the camp through documents, photographs, and the testimony of survivors.

The memorial’s permanent exhibition, revised in recent years, places Mauthausen in the context of the Nazi camp system and the war economy, and it names the victims by nationality and by group. Visitors walk the same route the prisoners walked, from the gate through the roll-call square to the quarry, and guides explain the history of each place without sensational detail.

The memorial also maintains the subcamp sites, where the traces are often fainter: at Gusen, a memorial and a visitors’ centre mark the site of the largest subcamp; at Ebensee, the tunnels dug by prisoners remain visible; at Melk, a memorial stands near the former camp. The preservation of these sites is deliberate.

Unlike some camps that were demolished after the war, Mauthausen’s stone buildings survived, and the Austrian state decided early that the site should be kept as a memorial rather than returned to other uses. School groups from Austria and across Europe visit the memorial each year, and its education department provides materials for teachers and runs seminars for young people.

Visiting, Education and Remembrance

Each year on 5 May, the anniversary of the liberation, a ceremony is held at Mauthausen attended by survivors and their families, representatives of the victims’ countries, and Austrian officials. Delegations from Spain, Poland, France, the Soviet successor states, and many other countries lay wreaths at the national monuments that stand on the site, each commemorating the victims of one country or group.

The ceremony is deliberately international, reflecting the fact that the victims of Mauthausen came from across Europe. The memorial’s education work extends beyond the anniversary: it runs workshops for schoolchildren, training for teachers, and research projects that use the camp’s archives to reconstruct the lives of individual prisoners.

The archives hold the names of most of the people who passed through the camp, and families can ask the memorial to search for a relative. The challenge for the memorial, as for all camp memorials, is to keep the history accurate and specific rather than abstract: to show that the victims were individuals with names, families, and lives before the camp, and that the perpetrators were also individuals who made choices.

The memorial also faces the practical challenges of preservation — the stone of the quarry and the barracks needs constant maintenance — and of reaching younger visitors for whom the Second World War is distant history. Its answer has been to focus on the individual story, the document, and the place, rather than on spectacle.

The National Monuments at the Site

The national monuments at Mauthausen, built by the countries whose citizens died there, are among the most moving features of the site. The Spanish monument, the Polish monument, the French monument, and the monuments of many other nations stand in a field beyond the camp walls, each in the style of its own country.

They were built by survivor associations and governments in the decades after the war, and they are the focus of the annual liberation ceremony. Each monument names the dead of its country and carries an inscription in its own language, so that a visitor walking among them can see, in stone, the European scale of the camp.

The monuments also reflect the politics of remembrance: some were built quickly, others only after decades of debate, and their inscriptions sometimes reflect the political language of the time in which they were made. Together they form a landscape of memory that is both Austrian and international, and they remind visitors that Mauthausen was not an Austrian camp alone but a camp of the whole of occupied Europe.

9. Commemoration and Education

The Annual Liberation Ceremony

The liberation ceremony held each year on 5 May is the central act of commemoration at Mauthausen. Survivors and their families, youth groups, diplomats, and Austrian officials gather at the Appellplatz and walk to the national monuments, where wreaths are laid and the names of the dead are read.

The ceremony is organised by the Mauthausen Committee, an international association of survivors and their descendants, together with the Austrian state, and it has been held without interruption since the first anniversary of the liberation. In the early years the survivors themselves led the ceremony; today their children and grandchildren speak, and young people from across Europe read the names of victims from their own countries.

The ceremony deliberately avoids military display. There are no weapons, no march-pasts, and no speeches celebrating victory; instead there are readings, music, and a minute of silence at the quarry. The intention is to keep the focus on the victims and on the warning the camp represents.

The ceremony is also a political act: Austrian presidents and chancellors have used it to acknowledge Austria’s responsibility, and representatives of the victims’ countries have used it to insist that the history of the camp be taught accurately. For the families who attend, the ceremony is personal: many come to find the name of a father, grandfather, or uncle on a monument or in the archive, and to stand in the place where he died.

Teaching the History of Mauthausen

Teaching the history of Mauthausen presents a particular challenge because the subject is so grave and the evidence so stark. The memorial’s education department works with teachers to prepare school visits, providing materials that explain the camp’s history in age-appropriate language and that focus on individual prisoners rather than on statistics alone.

Pupils are encouraged to follow the story of one prisoner through the documents — his registration card, his work assignment, the date of his death — so that the scale of the camp becomes comprehensible through a single life. The memorial also runs international youth projects, in which young people from different countries work together on the archives and present their findings at the liberation ceremony.

Outside Austria, Mauthausen is taught as part of the history of the Holocaust and the Nazi camp system, and its story appears in textbooks, documentaries, and the collections of Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The educational message is consistent: the camp was not the work of a few monsters but the product of a system in which ordinary institutions — firms, ministries, railways, and local authorities — cooperated in persecution and murder, and understanding that system is the best protection against its repetition.

The memorial’s staff are clear that education, not only commemoration, is the purpose of the site.

Research and the Archives

The Mauthausen Memorial holds one of the most complete camp archives in Europe, including registration records, transport lists, death records, and the photographs preserved by Francisco Boix. Researchers use these archives to reconstruct the history of the camp and its subcamps, to identify victims, and to answer questions from families.

The archive is also the basis for the memorial’s publications and for the work of historians in Austria and abroad, who have used it to correct early estimates of the death toll and to document the role of the subcamps. The archives are open to researchers, and the memorial publishes its findings in German and English, making the history of Mauthausen accessible to an international audience.

The work of the archive is never finished: new documents are still discovered, families still come forward with photographs and letters, and each new piece of evidence adds a name or a detail to the record. The archive’s guiding principle is that every victim should be named where possible, and that the history of the camp should be written from the documents rather than from memory alone.

10. Legacy

The Historical Legacy of Mauthausen

The historical legacy of Mauthausen is the evidence it provides about the Nazi camp system at its most extreme. As a Grade III camp, Mauthausen was designed to kill through labour, and its history shows how the SS combined economic exploitation with murder: the quarries and factories needed workers, but the regime ensured that workers died and were replaced. The camp’s history also shows the European scale of Nazi persecution.

Prisoners came from more than thirty countries, and the subcamps spread across Austria, so that Mauthausen was not a local atrocity but a central institution of the occupation of Europe. Historians use Mauthausen to study the economics of the camp system, the role of prisoner-functionaries, the organisation of resistance inside the camps, and the behaviour of the SS.

The camp’s records, unusually complete for a concentration camp, make it possible to study these questions in detail, and the work of historians such as the staff of the Mauthausen Memorial continues to refine the picture. The legacy is also legal: the Dachau trial of the camp staff and the use of Boix’s photographs at Nuremberg helped establish the principle that camp crimes could be prosecuted and that photographic evidence could convict.

That principle has shaped international law ever since, from the trials after the wars in the former Yugoslavia to the work of the International Criminal Court.

Remembrance and the Warning for the Present

The remembrance of Mauthausen carries a warning that remains relevant. The camp was built by a state that presented itself as lawful, staffed by officials who followed orders, and supplied by firms that sought profit; its victims were first labelled as criminals, asocials, or enemies, and then stripped of their rights step by step.

The memorial’s message is that this process — the labelling of a group, the removal of legal protection, and the use of forced labour — is recognisable and must be resisted at its earliest stage. That message is the reason the memorial insists on naming the victims and on teaching the history of the camp to young people who have no personal memory of the war.

The legacy of Mauthausen is therefore not only historical but civic: it is a reminder that democratic institutions, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities are not abstractions but the conditions that prevent camps from being built. The survivors who founded the memorial understood this, and they chose to preserve the site rather than demolish it, so that future generations could stand in the quarry and understand what had happened there.

The camp’s stones, the Stairs of Death, and the names on the monuments remain, and they ask the visitor a simple question: what would you have done, and what will you do now?

Why the Site Was Preserved

The decision to preserve Mauthausen as a memorial was taken early, and it was not inevitable. After liberation, the camp was used briefly as a displaced persons camp, and there were proposals to demolish the barracks and return the site to other uses. The survivors and the Austrian state instead decided to keep the site, and in 1949 the camp was declared a national memorial.

The decision reflected the survivors’ conviction that the physical place mattered: that a visitor who walks the Stairs of Death understands the camp differently from a reader of a book, and that the stones themselves are evidence. Preservation has required constant work and funding, and the memorial has had to balance the needs of visitors with the need to protect the fabric of the site.

The result is a memorial that is both a museum and a place of mourning, and that continues to draw visitors from across the world who come to learn, to remember, and to pay their respects to the dead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Mauthausen Concentration Camp?
Mauthausen was in Upper Austria, near the town of Mauthausen, about twenty kilometres east of Linz, on a granite hill above the Danube. The main camp stood above the Wiener Graben granite quarry, and its subcamps were spread across Austria.

How many people died at Mauthausen?
An estimated 90,000 to 120,000 people died at Mauthausen and its subcamps between 1938 and 1945, according to the figures used by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Mauthausen Memorial. The exact number cannot be fixed because the SS destroyed many records, and some estimates of the total are higher.

What were the Stairs of Death?
The Stairs of Death were the 186 uneven steps leading from the granite quarry up to the camp. Prisoners were forced to carry heavy blocks of granite up the steps, and many died from exhaustion, falls, or beatings on the stairs.

Who were the prisoners at Mauthausen?
Prisoners came from across occupied Europe and included political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Spanish Republicans, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual men, and people the Nazis labelled as criminals or asocial. About 190,000 people passed through the Mauthausen system.

When was Mauthausen liberated?
Mauthausen was liberated on 5 May 1945 by the 11th Armored Division of the United States Army. The SS had already begun to flee, and the prisoners were found in a state of starvation and disease. The liberation is commemorated every year on 5 May.

Can the site be visited today?
Yes. The site is the Mauthausen Memorial, a museum and place of remembrance open to the public. Visitors can see the barracks, the Appellplatz, the quarry and the Stairs of Death, the gas chamber and crematorium, and the national monuments, and the memorial provides guides and educational materials.

Related articles

• French Resistance
• Imperial War Museum London
• De-Stalinization

Sources

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, entry on Mauthausen
• Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Resource Center, material on Mauthausen
• Mauthausen Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen), publications and archive material
• Hans Maršálek, The History of Mauthausen Concentration Camp (1987)
• Evelyn Le Chêne, Mauthausen: The History of a Death Camp (1971)
• Bertrand Perz, The Mauthausen Concentration Camp, 1938–1945, in The Concentration Camp System, edited volume